Where those associated with Western films from around the world are laid to rest.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

RIP Tommy Kelly

Tommy Kelly, Star of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' Dies
at 90

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

2/9/2016

Then a 12-year-old from the Bronx, he was picked by
producer David O. Selznick to play the boy in the adaptation of Mark Twain's
1876 novel.

Tommy Kelly, who starred as the mischievous Missouri boy
immortalized by Mark Twain in David O. Selznick’s 1938 film The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, has died. He was 90.

Kelly, who was done in Hollywood by the time he turned
25, died Jan. 26 of congestive heart failure at home in Greensboro, N.C., his
son, Matt, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The famed producer Selznick handpicked the freckle-faced
Kelly, then a 12-year-old student at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to play
Tom in the United Artists film. Legend has it that 25,000 youngsters from
around the country had auditioned.

Kelly then starred as the title character Billy Peck in
Peck’s Bad Boy With the Circus (1938) and cried on camera as a youngster with a
Confederate band in Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).

The son of a fireman, Kelly and his family relocated to
Los Angeles in 1936 for the filming of Tom Sawyer. He later appeared in such
films as Curtain Call (1940), Military Academy (1940), Irene (1940), Double
Date (1941), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), The Beginning or the End
(1947), The West Point Story (1950) and The Magnificent Yankee (1950).

Kelly enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Europe
during World War II. After his Hollywood days, he earned a Ph.D. from Michigan
State and was a high school teacher and counselor in Culver City and an
administrator in the Orange County school system.

He then accepted an assignment as a Peace Corps
administrator in Monrovia, Liberia, and served as superintendent of
international schools in Liberia and Venezuela. He returned to the States and
worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.